This is the perfect time of year to take a look at an atmospheric winter landscape from the University’s Fine Art Collection by painter Stanley Simmonds.
This is the perfect time of year to take a look at an atmospheric winter landscape from the University’s Fine Art Collection by painter Stanley Simmonds (1917 – 2006).
About the Painting
Winter Scene I was painted in 1983. It is an oil painting on board. The title of the painting does not give away the exact location of the painting but the painter’s family believe it depicts Bodmin Moor. With thick snow on the ground, the ominous grey sky and the whistling wind through the bare bushes, the cold and wildness of the moor is evocatively portrayed. The brush strokes working out in different directions from the dark bushes give the sense of the movement of the wind.
About the Artist
Stanley Simmonds was born in 1917 in Droitwich, Worcestershire. He attended Birmingham College of Art. His artistic education was interrupted by World War II when he served in the Royal Navy. It was during this time that he made a life-long friend of the renowned Cornish poet, Charles Causley.
After the war he resumed his studies, attending the Royal College of Art in 1946. He married in 1950 and lived in London with his wife Cynthia. After completing his studies, Stanley Simmonds became an art teacher at the Chiselhurst and Sidcup Grammar school, where he stayed for 30 years. He was a much respected teacher and his most famous pupil was the illustrator Quentin Blake.
Quentin Black said of Stanley Simmonds,
“I first came to know Stanley Simmonds as a teacher, when he returned from the navy after the war to take over the art room at Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar School. He made it a place where not only art was produced but where art conversations could go on. He was enormously helpful and valuable to me, as I am sure he was to many others, because his commentary on your work was not a question of marks and assessment but an adult exchange about what you had actually done.”
Whilst being a highly-regarded teacher of art, he continued with his own art practice and successfully exhibited his work from the late 1950s into the 1970s, receiving complimentary reviews by distinguished critics. His exhibitions featured mainly figurative work, landscapes and architectural subjects with a focus on colour and form.
In the 1950s and 1960s through a series of semi-abstract paintings Simmonds explored the early morning world of Billingsgate Fish market, using subtle blocks of colour and tone to evoke brilliantly the early morning world in which the market-traders plied their trade. These pictures mark a departure from Simmonds’s more figurative work and the start of an exploration of the abstraction. See examples of his Billingsgate works here.
He exhibited work in the Royal Academy Summer exhibitions of 1955 -* Billingsgate Market*, 1957 – Fish Porters, Small Boats and Trawlers in Harbour and 1959 - Trawlers.
You may be interested to know that the University of Exeter’s Special Collections archive contains some documents which point to connections between Stanley Simmonds and Cornish poets AL Rowse, Charles Causley and Jack Clemo. Stanley Simmonds also illustrated a poem by Charles Causley, published in the form of a pamphlet, entitled, ‘Here we go round the round house’. The draft manuscripts for this poem can also be found in the University of Exeter’s Special Collections archive. Access the University of Exeter Special Collections catalogue here.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the Estate of Stanley Simmonds for allowing me to draw from Elspeth Moncrieff's biography of the artist on their website http://stanleysimmonds.com/ . This website also contains a fascinating gallery of Stanley Simmonds's artworks which is thoroughly recommended.
Thanks also to the Estate of Stanley Simmonds for permission to reproduce the photographic portait of Stanley Simmonds in this article.
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